Sony Playstation 4: Unveil on 20th February

According to invitation sent out to the media on Thursday, Sony is gearing up for a big announcement on 20th February, 2013.

Sony said that we’d “see the future” at the special February event, and the WSJ’s sources say it’s definitely going to be a next-gen console, debuted ahead of a similar evolution of Xbox game console from Microsoft, which will likely be unveiled in June at the E3 video game conference in Los Angeles.

Gossips about what the console is going to look like so far include keeping an optical disc drive, said to be a concession designed to ensuring that large-sized games are still simple to use for customers to actually obtain and play, and a move from the Cell chip that powers the present PLAYSTATION 3 to an AMD-based design, which can mess with things in terms of backwards compatibility with latest games. That will upset current customers, but impress those customers is not even Sony’s biggest issue with fielding a next-gen product; it is attracting new users from a young gamer population which has grown up on mobile.

Sony will need to offer a much more robust iteration of PlayStation Network if it is to tempt casual users and gamers alike. Last year the company bought cloud gaming service Gaikai for $380m, so we can expect some kind of streaming service for games and video content.